---
title: "Mitch Horowitz traces modern occultism to ancient traditions"
url: "https://usubjects.com/article/mitch-horowitz-traces-modern-occultism-to-ancient-traditions-3361"
updated: "2026-08-20T16:02:09.608Z"
description: "Mitch Horowitz traces modern occultism back through ancient Egyptian, Greek, Persian, Roman, Hermetic, Gnostic, alchemical, and astrological traditions, arguing that these fragmented inheritances still shape contemporary spiritual thought. A separate review by David Metcalfe frames the modern occult as a mix of consumerism, folklore, exorcism, and UFO belief, while leaving open the possibility that some occult forces may be real."
sources: ["https://mitchhorowitz.substack.com/p/the-birth-of-occultism"]
licence: "All rights reserved"
---

# Mitch Horowitz traces modern occultism to ancient traditions

Published: 2026-08-19  
Source: [Anomalist](https://mitchhorowitz.substack.com/p/the-birth-of-occultism)

### Overview

Mitch Horowitz’s latest historical reflection, **“The Birth of Occultism,”** argues that what many people now call modern occultism is not a fringe invention of the twentieth century, but a **reappearance of older spiritual currents** that stretch back through Egypt, Greece, Persia, Rome, North Africa, and the Hermetic and Gnostic traditions. In Horowitz’s view, these inherited systems—though often fragmented, obscured, or filtered through later centuries of religious conflict—continue to shape contemporary ideas about mind, fate, hidden knowledge, and the nature of reality. “Western culture is occult-rooted,” he writes, framing the modern occult not as an aberration, but as a **reencounter with ancient modes of thought** that predate Abrahamic religion.

### Ancient inheritance, modern expression

Horowitz’s argument centers on the idea that **occultism is a modern adaptation of late-stage polytheistic spirituality** rather than a wholly new belief system. He points to the way ancient traditions survive in pieces: in esoteric philosophy, ritual practice, symbolic cosmology, astrology, alchemy, and beliefs about unseen intelligences or parallel dimensions of existence. The key claim is not simply that these traditions were preserved, but that they were transformed—recombined into modern vocabularies that still shape how people think about self-transformation, hidden powers, and spiritual experimentation. In Horowitz’s telling, even highly individualized modern seekers are participating in a much older inheritance, one that has been carried forward in altered and often contested forms.

### Jack Parsons as a case study

Horowitz uses rocket scientist **Jack Parsons** as a vivid example of how occult ideas entered modern life. Parsons, a cofounder of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and one of the most brilliant engineers of his era, was also a dedicated occultist who moved in circles associated with **Aleister Crowley** and **L. Ron Hubbard**. His interest in esoteric practice helped define his reputation inside and outside the scientific world, and it also contributed to tensions with the U.S. defense establishment, which denied him security clearances. Horowitz presents Parsons not as an anomaly, but as a product of a broader culture of experimentation in which science, metaphysics, and radical speculation could overlap. Even Parsons’s dramatic death in a Pasadena home laboratory in 1952 has only deepened the mythic quality of his legacy.

### A contested cultural revival

The article also places modern occultism in a broader media and cultural context. Horowitz suggests that the vocabulary of hidden forces, alternative realities, and spiritual experimentation now circulates widely in modern society, whether through literature, film, subcultures, or spiritual marketplaces. That diffusion has made occult ideas more mainstream, but also more contested. In a separate review, **David Metcalfe** described the modern occult as a mixture of **consumerism, folklore, exorcism, and UFO belief**, while still allowing for the possibility that some occult forces may be genuine. That framing highlights a central tension in the field: for some, occultism is a cultural artifact shaped by media and belief; for others, it remains a serious inquiry into realities that traditional institutions have ignored or dismissed.

### Why it matters now

Taken together, these perspectives suggest that occultism is not only a niche subject of historical curiosity, but a **live question about what modernity has forgotten and what it may still be unable to explain**. Horowitz’s project is explicitly historical, but it also carries a wider implication: if modern culture is built atop older spiritual strata, then dismissing those traditions wholesale may mean overlooking part of the foundation beneath contemporary thought. Whether viewed as philosophy, folklore, psychology, or metaphysics, the occult remains one of the more enduring ways people have tried to make sense of hidden influence, personal agency, and the possibility that reality contains more than the visible world.

## Provenance

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